I don’t know that there has ever been an editorial with whose opening passages I agreed with less than this one from the Washington Post:

Health care keeps growing more expensive because the American system is less and less a free market. Fewer people pay directly for medical care, and government heavily subsidizes demand without increasing supply, a sure route to higher prices. The Biden administration worsened these dynamics by making it too easy to sign up for zero-premium insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act — which invited rampant fraud — and by extending unnecessary Medicare Part D subsidies.

but with whose conclusions I agreed with so strongly:

The Trump administration took reasonable and modest steps to address both problems. Democratic leaders characterized them as draconian cuts. Now the numbers are in, and the sky didn’t fall.

These are the “numbers” that I found startling:

Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services tell us that just 51 of the 760,000 removed enrollees have requested reinstatement. Those 51 accounts have yet to be verified “due to suspicious agent and broker activity, possible impersonations and other red flags warranting further scrutiny,” according to a CMS official.

51 is roughly .001% of the total removed. Less than one ten-thousandth. Not bad for government work. And even that number may be an overstatement.

What’s wrong with doing something that saves more than $2 billion and hurts no one? Youth wants to know.

What I disagree with most is the opening sentence. We haven’t had a “free market” in healthcare for more than a century and there is no longer a path to one that most Americans would accept. I’ve already proposed my solution and it isn’t a free market. You cahn’t get the-ah from he-ah.

The old friend I mentioned in a previous post made Variety.

I continue to take note of the sharp difference between the editorial policies of the Washington Post prior to its acquisition by Jeff Bezos and its present editorial policy. At times I’m not sure whether I’m reading a Washington Post editorial or a post at Reason.com (a libertarian organization/journal). The most recent example is this editorial on President Trump’s offer to bail out farmers:

President Donald Trump is trying to rescue vulnerable Republicans in the Midwest by promising an $8 billion bailout for farmers two weeks before the midterms. That would bring direct federal payments to farmers this fiscal year to about $55 billion. The amount is about a quarter of what farms add annually to U.S. gross domestic product and nearly five times the level of direct payments in 2017.

I don’t support either President Trump or farm subsidies. As should be no surprise IMO the Trump Administration’s most recent offer is feckless. Here’s the part I found interesting:

Farmers face real hardships. Diesel prices per gallon have risen about 75 percent and trade disruptions from the Iran war have boosted fertilizer prices. Pointless trade wars and tariffs have reduced foreign markets where American farmers can sell their crops and have raised prices for equipment. Ranchers have also voiced frustration at the chilling effect immigration raids have had on the meatpacking workforce.

That’s the sole mention of migrant workers, immigrants, immigration, or immigration enforcement in the piece. That’s interesting considering that, if the Trump Administration has a key focus, I would think it was immigration enforcement.

I think it would be interesting if the editors quantified the effects of those on farmers. I would genuinely like to know their relative impacts. I don’t know what their relative importance to farmers might be. Maybe their significance is cumulative.

Here’s something I haven’t done before. It’s a picture of me hard at work on a post for this blog.

I wanted to take note of this Wall Street Journal op-ed by Joel Zinberg. Here’s the opening passage:

Sen. Bernie Sanders first introduced his Medicare for All legislation in 2017. Despite multiple reintroductions, the proposal has never received a floor vote in either congressional chamber. Medicare for All has become a rallying cry for progressives this election season, and recent polling suggests public support has surged. Voters should be careful what they wish for.

Two-thirds of Americans favor Medicare for All, according to a new KFF poll—a substantial increase from 2020, when roughly half of respondents were in favor. But most Americans don’t understand the proposal or its likely effects. Medicare for All would eliminate competition and choice in medical care, limit access, and inevitably lead to tax increases.

but the passage I found most telling was this:

When respondents in the KFF poll were told the effects of Medicare for All, support plunged. Only 52% were in favor when told that private insurance would be eliminated, 38% when learning Medicare for All could threaten the current Medicare program, 35% once they considered that Medicare for All could require most Americans to pay higher taxes, and 24% after learning it could lead to delays for medical tests and treatments.

It has been said that Sanders’s bill isn’t a bill that has been enacted by Congress and that’s true enough. My question is what is an incoming Democratic Congress likely to do? Given that 84% of Democrats support “Medicare for All” I think it’s a measure very likely to be enacted by the hypothetical incoming Democratic Congress even though the actual bill might have considerably less support.

IMO the likely outcome of such a single-payer system in the United States is likely to be considerably worse than Dr. Zinberg suggests. If public payment rates make private practice sufficiently attractive, some physicians could withdraw, serve smaller affluent patient panels, and reduce the capacity available to everyone relying on the public program. I think that unless the restrictions on practicing medicine outside the national systems are considerably more strict than the bill presently establishes the actual outcome will be concierge healthcare for the well-to-do, unfettered by the price restrictions of “Medicare for All”, and less healthcare for the balance of the population.

Today Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s column in the Wall Street Journal is “Latin America’s Coming Population Bust”. Here’s a snippet:

When the Biden administration opened the southern border, it seemed there was no end to the millions of hungry working-age migrants who wanted to enter the U.S. Western Europe experienced something similar in 2015-16, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed a flood of refugees, mostly from war-torn Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

But the days of an endless supply of labor eager to serve the needs of the developed world may be drawing to a close. Not tomorrow, but soon enough. Countries accustomed to receiving great numbers of aspiring young people from beyond their borders may have to learn to do with fewer.

Here’s the population pyramid for Latin America and the Caribbean:

The short version is that in Latin America and the Caribbean Generation Alpha (the one after Gen Z) is smaller than Millennials and about the same as Generation X. And at this point it is unlikely to get larger (since Gen Beta is hot on its heels).

There are a number of comments that come to mind about that but I’ll limit myself to just one. That’s likely to result in political turbulence and possible upheaval. After decades of convincing people that aggregate consumption is the way to measure economic wellbeing, changing course to convince them that it might not be that important after all will be darned hard.

Dark. As in no light, opaque. It’s truly amazing to me how little significant news in Africa is being covered by U. S. major media sources. It is as though the continent barely exists. For example, are you aware that there are presently four major areas of armed conflict in Africa at present: Sudan, Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Sahel, particularly Mali and Burkina Faso?

Here’s another. The outbreak of Ebola presently going on in eight provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with nearly 10,000 infections and 4,500 deaths is the largest in its recent history. And it has spread beyond the DRC: Kenya and Uganda have experienced deaths from Ebola.

To me this is an illustration of the weakness of our journalistic profession. It’s news. It’s a story. And an important one.

As I mentioned in my last post about our trip, we spent the next several days with friends in Wasilla. The first evening they treated us to an “Alaska dinner” (pictured above) that included salmon, halibut, moose, and bear.

The next day we toured a musk ox farm, guided by one of our friends, the operating manager of the farm. We found the farm fascinating and charming. We wanted to take a musk ox home with us! Sadly, they would not thrive in Chicago—it’s too warm here!

North to Alaska
Next Stop, Ketchikan
Port of Call: Juneau
Next Stop: Skagway
At Sea
Leaving the Ship

I was actually astonished by this Bloomberg editorial via ArcaMax. It’s not that I don’t agree with them. I do. It’s that they seem to think what they’re suggesting can actually happen.

With a month to go until midterm elections, Democrats find themselves in better shape than expected. Odds are, they’ll win the House and perhaps a slim majority in the Senate. Exactly what they’ll do with that power, though, remains a mystery.

On the campaign trail, most of the party’s congressional candidates have been long on rhetoric and short on policy. In lieu of an agenda, many are promising partisan warfare: more investigations of the president, expansive impeachment proceedings, subpoenas for documents and witnesses, aggressive oversight hearings, and more.

Here’s the amazing part:

For now, suffice it to say that the country has a lot of problems to fix, and there are plenty of opportunities for progress, if lawmakers are willing to compromise. There’s rarely been a better time to put pragmatism over partisanship.

Here’s a video that illustrates how the political parties have changed in ideology over the last 250 years, Congress by Congress. For a complete description see here.

The TL;DR version is that the two political parties are farther apart today than at any previous point since the Civil War. To my eye the two political parties have forgotten how to forge compromises.

In the interest of bonhomie here are a few proposals for producing bipartisan legislation:

• Negotiate in private before going public.
• Let both sides declare a win.
• Start with a small, cross-party working group.
• Agree on facts before arguing about solutions.
• Build positive personal relations with members of the other party.
• Don’t include “poison pills” in legislation. This one is vital. If you make it suicidal for the other party to agree with you, don’t be surprised if you don’t get a lot of agreement.
• Be willing to give up something you actually want.